Short abstract:

The workshop explores processes associated with construction of space, place and religious rituals in the context of migration. We want to focus on ways the landscapes and the religious rituals taking place in them, figure in creating, recreating the presence, history and memory of social groups.

Long abstract:

Migration as an individual stress situation produces certain forms of anxiety for the moving actors, as well as for the ones left behind. The resolution of this fear condition finds often its expression in religious rituals anchored in the ancient or new environment (the transformation of the local in territories of grace like the Notre Dame de Santa Cruz sanctuary in Nimes). Furthermore the connections to the spatial and ritual origins before migration should be considered and elucidated as links through time and space.
New forms of acquisition of space in the frame of recent models of migration will be explored. The modalities of transnational realities as consequence of migration in connection with the role of religion and historical memory will be illuminated. The circulation of beliefs as "portable practices" (CSORDAS 2009) as for example the transmission of African religions to the New World are to be examined.
We want to elaborate these key marks concerning space and place, location religious ritual and cultural memory. Contributions should illustrate how conceptual, ideological and material dimensions of space, in the frame of the uncertainty situation that presents migration, are central to the production of religious and cultural life. The workshop wants to assemble key anthropological communications that challenge definition of space, place and religion in the context of migration. They should reveal how the ideological and material dimensions of space and landscape characteristics in situations of uncertainty and disquiet like migration, are central to the production of religious life and cultural memory.